Sector 32 is already in use by the program `FlexNet'
Just tried to install Grub on a debootstrap‘ed hard drive, but Grub complained:
Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: warning: Sector 32 is already in use by the program 'FlexNet'; avoiding it. This software may cause boot or other problems in future. Please ask its authors not to store data in the boot track.
Never heard of that FlexNet thing, but according to Wikipedia it’s a software license manager. And we all know how this whole DRM thing just bugs us.. So it bugged me because the new system wouldn’t boot properly.. Other people having similar problems.
However, it seems impossible to force grub overriding this sector, but you may wipe it manually. In my case sector 32 was infected by DRM, so I did the following:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 seek=32If that’s done Grub installs like a charm, the system booted again, and the admin was happy that another DRM thing died :)
The figure I used in this article was made by Brendan Mruk and Matt Lee. They share it as CC BY-SA 3.0.
Martin Scharm
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Your fix for clearing sector 32 so that GRUB2 could install without warnings worked like a charm. Thanks!